Tuesday, August 11, 2009

I really am not liking this Philip Roth novel I'm reading, which has now descended into being one of those 60s novels about Freudian analysis. Of course Roth is much cleverer than that, but the cleverness palls. I tire of the main character's obsession with himself and begin to long for a leisurely 19th-century novel about everyone in town, where the author sits up in the sky next to God and makes large-hearted observations about her creations. I expect that Roth doesn't care for those kinds of novels.

On another, possibly related note: a friend of mine has recently been reading more Robert Lowell poems than any regular reader could digest, which has prompted my recollection of this comment from Ian Hamilton's biography of Lowell:

Back in Boston, the Sunday Globe proclaimed him MOST PROMISING POET IN 100 YEARS . . . MAY BE GREATER THAN JAMES AND AMY. And the paper carried a comment from "Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Annapolis graduate, retired navy officer and stockbroker"; "Poets," Lowell's father said, "seem to see more in his work than most other people."

Ah, family life.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

Ah, those novels of Angela Thirkell, E.M. Delafield, E.F. Benson, Miss Read, Jan Karon where nothing really happens and yet everything happens. I love getting lost in those books.

Beto Palaio said...

In recollections of a broken mind I do prefer Spalding Gray... He only couldn’t support his own mind problems, but his writings are a journey apart...

Dawn Potter said...

I haven't read Gray but maybe I should. He grew up near where I grew up, and his name was always in the paper in that "we're pretending he's more important than he is because he came from our town and we need a famous person" kind of way. As a result, I never had a clear idea about who he was and whether he really was an artist or not.